Traditional manufacturing has relied upon subtractive approaches for forming components in desired shapes. These subtractive approaches involve removing a portion of an initial, raw material, and can utilize cutting and/or machining tools to form holes, surfaces, shapes, etc. in that material. More recently, additive manufacturing approaches have begun to emerge as suitable alternatives or replacements for the traditional subtractive approaches. Additive manufacturing (AM) includes adding individual layers of a material over one another to form a desired component shape, and can include techniques such as selective laser melting (SLM), also known as direct metal laser melting (DMLM) or direct metal laser sintering (DMLS), or selective electron beam melting (SEBM). Powder-based AM utilizes a heat source (e.g., a melting beam such as a laser beam or electron beam) to melt layers of a base material (e.g., a powdered metal) to form a desired shape, layer-by-layer. The melting beam forms a melt pool in the base material, which subsequently solidifies. Next, another layer of base material is placed (e.g., spread) over the underlying layer and melted to that layer to build up the part. This process is repeated for a number of layers until the component shape is formed. Often a hot isostatic pressing (HIP) process is used to remove cracks and defects (e.g., debonding, pores, etc.) which remain within the component after melting and solidification.
Conventional scanning strategies, e.g., as applied in SLM machines, use centro-symmetrical laser spot configurations providing uniform irradiation conditions in all scanning directions. Melting of powder material is realized by (often at least partially overlapping) parallel melting beam (e.g., laser) passes, also referred to as “tracks.” The laser tracks can be visually represented by vectors (also referred to as scan vectors), which illustrate the direction of movement of the melting beam as it heats and melts the powder material. As noted herein, conventional scanning processes might leave cracks and defects in the component, which are often attempted to be healed by hot isostatic pressing (HIP). However, these conventional approaches, even when paired with HIP, can still fail to remove cracks and defects which are proximate the surface of the component, e.g., at its outer surface. Because these cracks and/or defects have openings at the component surface, HIP cannot effectively pressurize those cracks/defects and close them from the finished component. The remaining cracks and/or defects can structurally weaken the component, leading to undesirable performance in use.